SeanReadsTheNews

Postrel's The Substance of Style on Sale for Kindle This Week

Libertarian thought leader, Bloomberg Views columnist and friend Virginia Postrel announces that her book "The Substance of Style," is discounted this week only for the Kindle at Amazon.com.

So if you haven't read Ms. Postrel's enlightening take on the business value of aesthetics and design, this is your chance to do so for only $2.99.  The link is here. 

Enjoy!

SeanHasNotBeenReadingTheNews due to time constraints from his work on the Celebrating Audio Theater - Old & New Convention as well it being the early rounds of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.  We expect posting here to pick up during the summer.

 

April Fool's Unemployment Porn

An early post on SRTN made fun of articles that put forward idiosyncratic employment opportunities as a solution for people facing unemployment - the classic being this New York  Times piece on Etsy.

“I have to wake up around 8, get coffee or tea, and knit for hours and hours and hours and hours,” said Ms. Gibran, who leveraged the exposure she got on the site to forge a deal with Urban Outfitters. “I’m like an old lady in a chair, catching up on podcasts, watching old Hitchcock shows. I will do it for 13 hours a day.” And even after all those hours knitting, she is constantly sketching new designs or trading e-mail messages with 50 or more customers a day.

“Etsy saved my life,” Ms. Gibran said. But, she added, “this is the hardest job I’ve ever had.”

Etsy's own April Fool's Joke this year about it acquiring the city of Portland, Ore., to get its economy going again is based on the same joke.

Under the terms of the so-called “Etsy Plan,” the Brooklyn-based e-commerce site will assume virtual control of Portland’s municipal government and put into action a five-year economic development plan largely aimed at offsetting state-sanctioned austerity measures by employing the roughly 8 percent of Portland’s unemployed citizens in the creation of Etsy-approved items.

Despite the existence of prior art, I do not intend to sue.

Associated Press: Speaking of Bias, How About Reading Your Own Headline?

It's fairly common knowledge that reporters don't write headlines, even though they are a major source of complaints.  I've had to calmly explain that to clients about 10,000 times during my career when a positive piece of coverage is buried under a difficult headline.

So I'm not blaming Stephen Singer of the Associated Press for "For long-unemployed, hiring bias rears its head," even though calling what he's describing the article "bias," is itself bias against hiring managers.

Recounting a recruiter telling an aspiring job hunter why he couldn't send her for an interivew - Singer reports:

The 54-year-old, who had been laid off from her IT job in Illinois, said the recruiter who responded to her online resume two years ago liked her qualifications and was set to schedule an interview. But he backed away, she said, when he learned she had been out of work for 13 months.The employer he represented would not consider applicants who were unemployed for more than six months, she said.

One could call that bias - one could also call it informed judgement but "Hiring Managers Show Informed Skepticism When Screening Jobless Candidates" wouldn't be much of a headline.

The article is pegged to several state-level laws aimed at forcing hiring managers to see unemployed job seekers even if they have no intention of hiring them, or in other words to mandate wasting the time of everyone involved and potentially costing the candidate out-of-pocket expenses like travel.

Singer rightly points out in the text that since there is no way to identify if a jobless applicant is denied a job specifically because of being jobless or any number of other factors, the laws would be unenforceable. 

Some personnel managers say evidence of discrimination is sketchy and that hiring decisions are based on a host of subjective reasons that defy remedies imposed by laws."There's much more subliminal discrimination against the unemployed that's hard to document," said Lynne Sarikas, director of the MBA Career Center at Northeastern University's College of Business Administration. "Hiring is an art, not a science. You rely on a gut reaction."

Singer goes on to report fears by business groups that the laws against discrimination are just a back-door gift to the trial attorneys to allow anyone unemployed who applies for a job to sue the company for not granting interviews.

Ultimately, the article is balanced - the headline isn't.  When that happens the PR person is in a suicide squeeze between an unhappy client and a blameless reporter.  

Reading the article definitely made me sympathize with all the parties involved.

We Got Pitched!

We received the following chart regarding the economics of for-profit education today from AccreditedOnlineColleges.net.  Apparently our earlier posts on a series of articles about for-profit schools we did back in '09 and '10 caught their attention and they asked that I post this graphic.

As a PR person, I'm rarely able to help a fellow practioner fill out his activity report, so here it goes:

Created by: Accredited Online Colleges 

We will resume normal blogging shortly.

Bloomberg: Ireland Sobers Up (Literally)

The austere approach of the Irish government to cleaning up after the banking mess that destroyed their economy a few years ago has led to numerous ironic headlines about the Irish sobering up, having hangovers, etc, all pegged to that country's legendary love for liquor.

Bloomberg News' Finbarr Flynn, perhaps my favorite byline in journalism, notes in story Friday that the sobriety trend in Ireland is literal as well as figurative these days.  I'm highlighting this story because St. Patrick's Day makes some reporting on Ireland obligatory but Flynn actually took the easy narrative and turned it upside down.  Rather than use easy metaphors that are already mined out, he took the opposite track and dug up real facts on the ground that show the interaction of culture and the economy.

Dublin pubs are fighting the slump in business with a 1 million-euro ($1.3 million) marketing campaign called “Dublin Does Fridays.” Sales have plunged as the jobless rate tripled since 2007 to an average 14.2 percent last year and emigration rose to the highest since the 19th century.About 76,400 people left Ireland in the 12 months ended last April, according to the statistics office. Many of those departing are under 30, the natural customer of Irish bars. In addition, about 40 percent of all alcohol bought was drunk at home in 2009 and 2010, up from 31 percent five years earlier, data show.

Flynn goes on to describe how the Irish board of health isn't entirely turned off by these developments and how pub owners are blaming supermarkets and liquor stores for too-aggressive discounting that endangers the special nature of Ireland's pub culture.

You can't help but see the ghost of the old country in U.S. politics after an article like that.

Or not listen to The Clancy Brothers' classic ode to alcoholism.

 

Nocera: MF Global Was a Crime

Joe Nocera of The New York Times took a look back at the MF Global story in his column on Tuesday, wondering why the worst financial crime of the collapse is getting such scant attention in the press.

He opens the column with a dramatic summation of exactly how bad this is, before examining why the government seems to be having so much trouble putting together a criminal case.

Let’s not mince words here. These executives committed a crime. Virtually every knowing violation of the Commodities Exchange Act is a crime, but taking money from segregated customer accounts is at the top of the list. And for good reason. Customer money is supposed to be sacrosanct. If a broker-dealer goes bankrupt, the segregated accounts are supposed to remain safe, a little like the way bank deposits remain protected if a bank goes under. Indeed, customers need to be able to trust the fact that their money is segregated and protected at all times. Otherwise, the markets can’t function.

He goes on to pick apart all the excuses about chaos and mistakes - pointing out along the way that MF Global is claiming it misused 25% of customer assets but somehow didn't realize where the money came from.

He notes that he doesn't believe that the U.S. Department of Justice is deliberately tanking their case because former MF Global CEO Jon Corzine is a huge fundraiser for President Obama but "he understand why some might."

Count me among them - but the column was a great distillation of the situation regardless of politics.

CNNMoney on Guns, Bunkers & Doomsday

Blake Ellis of CNNMoney.com produces a business story that strikes at the heart of the modern libertarian - how much does it cost to outfit a doomsday shelter in 2012 make-believe U.S. fiat money "dollars."

In a dissappointing turn, the econonmy/world-ending disaster isn't pegged directly to the Chinese asking for their money back but rather to polar shifts allegedly predicted by the Mayan calendar.

Bast has spent about $5,000 on stockpiles of food and water, and $11,000 on equipment including gas cookers, generators, batteries, water purifiers and solar power. He also purchased roughly an acre of land that's a 75-minute drive from Melbourne and 1,500 feet above sea level (in order to stay high and dry in case of a flood or tsunami). He has built a house there, as well as a bunker to serve as his "safe spot" in the event of an emergency. Together, the land, buildings and bunker have cost him a total of about $330,000.

We've been a little hard on Blake in the past, with whom we've since worked on multiple stories and is actually one of our best contacts in personal finance journalism right now.

Let us just say that she wiped clean any sins she comitted in over-exposing hypish single-source stories with this gem of a lede.

First you have to stock up on the appropriate gear, ammunition, food and shelter to survive a nuclear meltdown, asteroid, earthquake, solar flare or some other catastrophe. Then there's acquiring the materials you'll need to rebuild a community after the dust settles.

Once you've started there, you can't go wrong.

On a personal note, my goal of re-starting this blog as a regular thing has been sidelined temporarily by my work on a non-profit group launching Celebrating Audio Theater - Old & New, a new nostalgia/modern audio drama convention to take place in Newark, NJ October 12-13, 2012.  I'm responsible for the website/blog for that event as well as for the rest of its publicity and SeanReadsTheNews is the part of my life that's taking the hit for the necessary work.

If I'm not here often between now and the deep summer, that's why.

CNBC: PR Score for London Custom Tailor As Recession Narrows Waists

I can't tell if I love or hate Antonia Oprita's CNBC.com article reporting that a custom tailor in London has seen the average waistlines of his clients shrink since the recession started.

According to tailors Norton & Townsend, British men have lost more than half an inch off their waist because of the credit crunch, as expense accounts slimmed down or totally disappeared.
“The majority of our clients are at executive level who would have seen a business lunch almost as part of their daily working life,” said Austen Pickles, head of Norton & Townsend, in a statement. “But that is no longer the case with expense accounts and lazy lunches out of keeping with the downturn in the economic climate.”

On the negative side, the story has only one source, no direct quotes, no data.  It basically reads as if the reporter spoke to the tailor for 10 minutes and found the combination of recession, social technology and clothes keywords irresistible.

 On the positive side, it's pretty hilarious and hey, who says the informed opinion of people who are close to those in the know about the state of the economy can't be illuminating.

Who hasn't dreamed of making "stuff my clients do every day," an economic indicator - the free version of expensive detailed academic research that gets you ink.

As a matter of PR alone, this was a nice score for the tailor.

 

The Business of the Oscar Telecast Is Bad, Impact on Ticket Sales is Worse

SeanReadsTheNews.com is not above pandering and click-baiting, so on Oscar weekend, we have a two-link blog on business news covering the Academy Award Ceremony.

My old friend Virginia Postrel, currently writing a column for Bloomberg News because that's who you hire when you launch a new product and want someone to read it, writes about how to save the Oscars in her column today.

Getting to the heart of the business problem facing the broadcast, Virginia notes that the voters' interests aren't aligned with those of the audience.

As Hollywood historian Neal Gabler notes, however, Academy voters don’t like the movies that bring in the bucks, an attitude that seems to have intensified in recent years. “They are using the Oscars,” he suggests, “to stage a small protest against the sorts of movies they feel we the audience sadistically forces them to make.” The audience, in turn, stages its own protest by staying away -- or watching the show only for the evening gowns.

She also subtly punctures that preening by noting that the most highly rated recent broadcast was 2010, when box-office smashes like Avatar, The Blind Side and Up were nominated but a lesser performer, The Hurt Locker, won.  If you're an Academy voter and can't tell that Up was a superior movie to The Hurt Locker, you shouldn't be looking down at anyone else's critical facilities.

She also flagged in her Facebook account this great article by Russ Britt of MarketWatch on how an Oscar nomination has become a negative signal to the ticket-buying public.

It used to be that difficult to market films got a nice bump from being Oscar-nominated, now the contempt the voters show for the audience has been priced in, and it isn't working any longer.

According to BoxOfficeMojo.com, the bounce in box-office receipts after the Oscar nominations were announced Jan. 24 was the eighth worst in the last 30 years. The nominees still in theaters have gotten a 13% bonus thus far. The best year was 1989, when nominees tacked on 38% of their receipts between the nominations and the ceremony.

 Hard to argue with that.  Why take advice from people who can't tell that Up was a better movie than The Hurt Locker (or who thought Avatar deserved a nomination at all)?

The larger business journalism point here is that when your product is structured in a way that doesn't engage your buying audience it will fail even if, like the Oscars, it has every reason to succeed.

Most of Virginia's column was comprised of suggestions for increasing the immediacy of the Award Ceremony, such as limiting the voting to the audience in the room and having it take place in real time after each movie gets a speech in support of its merits.

She's arguing that engagement is key - wonder if anyone is listening?

 

 

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-24/save-oscars-with-live-voting-and-hindsight-commentary-by-virginia-postrel.html

Dow's Bad Deal on Olympic Sponsorship

Ernest Scheydar of Reuters News has a story today on the ugly PR pummeling Dow Chemical is taking in England for its sponsorship of the coming 2012 Olympics.

This blog likes to point out where the practice of public relations is uplifted to a core business competancy, like operations or finance and this case is one such example.  We frequently like to blog about where "public relations problems" are actually problems with bad facts (like BP after the Gulf disaster) rather than bad practice of PR.

In the case of Dow's situation in London right now, what I see is a completely unfair, media-driven attack on a blameless company that is admirably refusing to engage in the PR dance of apologize-make token-to-huge payment-move on model.

Dow said the controversy has not hurt sales of its plastics, insulation and other products. The company said it was surprised at what it considers a large amount of misinformation surrounding its link to Bhopal.

"Dow was never there. We did not acquire any of the connection with Bhopal," said George Hamilton, Dow's vice president of Olympic operations. "For some to try to tie Dow to this, and then to use the Olympic platform to try to serve their cause, it does call for some strong words."

Dow justified the sponsorship by forecasting an Olympic-related sales boost of $1 billion by 2020. Hamilton said that revenue goal remains on track.

To a certain extent, the media had to cover this story once India's government objected and large numbers of Indian nationals started protesting the Olympic site - but they didn't have to do so as often as they have and as one-sidedly.

I entered the public relations business in 1990 working for a firm that specialized in chemical companies.  Bhopal was a fresh memory then.  What I recall was that even at the time, any objective reporting noted that the wall collapsed and the poison gas escaped because Indians built a separate structure on a load-bearing wall connected to the plant over the objections of Union Carbide's management.

Then, when the disaster hit, the feckless Indian government quickly turned on a chemical company it had romanced into the country to avoid taking the blame for permitting the structure.

Now, nearly 30 years after the initial incident, the decedents of that government are still trying to find a deep pocket from which to collect monies that were never earned either by work or as payment for wrongdoing. The fact that they are trying to shake down a company that owns parts of Union Carbide that didn't include the part that operated the Bhopal plant makes the whole process even more transparently phony.